Dublin receives top rating for ninth year

The "excellent with distinction" rating on the Dublin City School District's state report card came as no surprise, district officials said.

JENNIFER NOBLIT, ThisWeek Community News

The "excellent with distinction" rating on the Dublin City School District's state report card came as no surprise, district officials said.

The Ohio Department of Education released the final 2011-12 state report cards last week after months of delay while the State Auditor looked into reports of data scrubbing at districts across the state.

Dublin City Schools was never implicated in the data tampering and received preliminary results in October, but the final rating and value added data was left out.

Now that final report cards are out, the district received the top rating for the ninth year in a row.

"I don't think it's a surprise locally, but there's a surprise statewide when you look at value added and see where (schools) rate," Superintendent David Axner said.

The value added measurement, the newest addition to state report cards, measures how much academic progress schools make from year to year, rating schools below, at or above a full year of progress.

"Some districts have a bigger gap to improve in," Axner said.

"We've been very successful over the years... . It does make it difficult to continue to improve that piece.

"There's a point where it's going to be very difficult to get a full year's growth," Axner said.

All of Dublin's 19 schools met or exceeded annual growth with the exception of Scottish Corners Elementary School which fell below a year of academic growth.

Other schools saw improvement from the 2010-11 report card, though.

Wright Elementary School was rated effective this year, the same rating as last year, but met Adequate Yearly Progress unlike last year.

AYP measures the performance of students in subgroups such as economically disadvantaged, multi-racial and limited-English.

Wright also improved on hitting state indicators this year meeting five out of eight this year over four out of eight last year.

State indicators were not met at the school in reading, math and science at the fifth-grade level, which means less than 75 percent of students performed at a proficient level or better on state tests.

Thomas Elementary School, rated excellent, also saw improvement this year as AYP was met.

Axner credited the teachers and school leadership with the improvements at the two elementary schools.

"If you look at those buildings, they're two of the most diverse buildings and two of the most transient buildings with kids coming in and out because of various situations," Axner said.

"They're very different than some of the elementaries that have very low transfer populations going in and out.

"They also have a high population of (English language learner) kids along with kids moving in and out at any time during the school year. It says a lot about the teachers there."